Conference Transcript - EXPE 2026-06-02

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

I'm Mark Mahaney, part of the Internet Equity Research Team at Evercore ISI. I was telling Ariane I gave a commencement address this weekend and I mentioned AI and then I had to deal with hecklers. And so I lost my voice shouting up, shouting over everybody for the next 30 minutes. It's good to be here and it's good to have you here, Ariane. This is, I think, your first public investor forum or conference. This is your first.

Ariane Gorin, CEO

It was my first with you.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

First, this is your, I'm going to say, I don't care. This is your first public investor conference. I'm glad you decided to do your first one with Everclear. So thank you.

Ariane Gorin, CEO

Two years on the job now.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

That's right. Yeah, we've had a, you know, we've been relatively bullish. And last year, you were one of our top picks. And we don't, you know, I've covered Expedia since, actually since the IPO. And we've had a lot of management turnover at the company. a lot, and it hasn't been necessarily a great thing. But we may, there may, for investors, there may be something much more investable now. I think there is. So I want you to talk about that. So I'm going to, we're going to go through a series of questions, and if anybody wants to jump in with questions in the end, please do. So you've been there for two years now. You've talked about these three strategic pillars. Just explain that to us, and you're pretty far into a turnaround. It's a relaunch. Instead of turn around, let's do a relaunch. Let's talk about the relaunch of Expedia and what you what you've been able to do so far and what you want to do for the next two years sure well first of all thank you

Ariane Gorin, CEO

for inviting me as you said I've been two years now in the role and when I stepped in I really said to the team look we need to simplify it we need to focus and we need to be dis execute with discipline we had come out of a platform transformation and we were in a position where the consumer business wasn't growing the way we wanted it to the b2b business was growing well and it was a matter of how do you sustain that and how do you continue that growth and so we came to three pillars the first is create more traveler value because if you're in a consumer business the most important thing is what is the value you're creating for your customers the second one was investing where we see the biggest opportunities for growth and the third was expanding margins so let me talk about each one and sort of what we've done and what is still ahead. So in the topic of driving more travel or value, our consumer business has three big brands, Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo. And we started by sharpening the value propositions for each of them. So Expedia is the one-stop shop where you can bundle and save, get great deals, there's a strong loyalty program, and it's really the one place you go to go places verbo is the trusted pure play vacation rental marketplace and hotels.com is the hotel pure play with a great loyalty program so it was strengthen those value propositions and then market them well build products that support them and have great supply you know on the product it you know when you look at the work we've done in expedia it's driving up the attach rates it's personalizing the product more it goes from basic things like better uptime site speed checkout paths kind of all of the e-commerce basics to things like driving the attach rate driving more trust in verbo so trust is really important in the vacation rentals category so making sure that with verbo care people trust that when they're in trip they're going to get what they were expecting to and then of course supply you know ultimately people want great assortment in prices we've done a lot of work in our in our loyalty program to have better member deals but if you take verbo for example until about a year ago we didn't have a ton of promotions and so last year we ran we rolled out a verbo promotion suite and in the first quarter over Over 30% of our bookings were on partner driven promotions. So that was a lot of work in driving traveler value and what is ahead, and this is probably the number one thing I'm most excited about, is I really believe that using AI in our product is how we are going to be able to be true personalized and trusted travel agents for people. I'm sure we'll get into that later, but that's on that first pillar around traveler value. a lot about what are we going to do in ai in the product to make people want to keep on coming back to us directly and whether it's for inspiration all the way down to booking and servicing the second pillar was around investing in the fastest growth drivers or where we have the biggest opportunities b2b has been i think it's we've had 18 quarters in a row of healthy double digit growth and we're continuing to invest to expand that so we're a leader in b2b we've got great partner relationships and we've been expanding the offerings that we have so not just hotel and vacation rental but what are the other lines of business like hotels or activities that we can provide to our partners for them to build out their travel programs also growth outside of the outside of north america because that's a place where our share isn't as high as it is in north america and so with our consumer business having real focus on specific markets to say how can we grow there now our b2b business is bigger outside of north america but you know we've really had a focus strategy for consumer and when i think about what's to come in in that area of investing for growth as i mentioned in b2b we're growing these non-lodging lines of business you may have seen in the last six months we've done an acquisition in activities a small acquisition in car rental that we announced last week and it's really about expanding the offering that we can provide to the partners we have and then adding more partners and then in international again that's a a big opportunity for us because we under punch in our weight and then the third pillar was about driving more productivity across the organization and expanding margins, which are two sides of the same coin. If you look in the last couple of years, you know, in 24, I believe that we expanded margins by about 50 basis points, last year by over 240, this year our guide is 100 to 130. And that really reflects the work we're doing across the P&L from, you know, how do you drive more revenue? How do you get more efficient on your cost of sales? How do we drive leverage in marketing and in overheads? And our management team is very committed to looking down the P&L and finding ways to drive more productivity while we're investing in the attractive things that I talked about earlier.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

Okay. You've covered quite a lot. Let's dig into a few of those. want to start with b2b because that's i guess the most consistently impressive growth that you've been able to um string together and so just talk again about the sustainability of that growth i guess it's you know going into non-lodging lines of business and and international expansion but maybe a little bit more on on how you sustain that for another 18 quarters

Ariane Gorin, CEO

so yeah i would say one the way to think about b2b is the travel industry is over three trillion dollars and if you if you look at our consumer business last year was 85 billion so there's a big gap there and then you know half of that is supplier direct or a couple of other big otas so there's still a huge amount of travel that happens in the world that our b2b business can go power and you know we think of it as how do you grow wallet share within our existing partners so it can be from adding new lines of business it can be if our own partners are moving into new geographies or they're developing you know ideas to grow their business how do we participate in that it can be adding new customers so we may talk about we signed a deal with uber recently we signed a deal with bank of montreal up in canada so we're constantly going and looking at that new businesses we can sign. And then, it's just in general, what is all of the value that we can add to these B2B partners in various ways.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

And then, I guess the core Expedia business, that seems to have required the least management attention, least turnaround, is that right?

Ariane Gorin, CEO

Maybe it's externally that it seems like that. I mean, I would say for all three of our big brands, of our big brands the challenge and opportunity has been to take the work that was done in a lot of our replatforming which was building these platform capabilities and then bring them to bear in a way that makes sense for each of the brands now Expedia has such an amazing value proposition this one place you go to go places bundle and save package deals loyalty program so maybe it seems like it required the least management attention because maybe how we talk about it but you know it's got such a great existing customer business a great value proposition but it's been amazing to see the work the team has done with better recommendations with driving better attach having travelers better understand the value proposition around packaging a lot of work has gone into servicing and for those of us in the industry, we all know that certain lines of business have more complexity in service requirements than others because brand Expedia cuts across all of them. We've done a lot of work in Expedia on servicing. So across our consumer businesses, we have over 30% of service that's self-serve. But then when someone does need to call us, how do we make sure there are short wait times, we're able to resolve things quickly? Because that also is then a driver of people repeating

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

more directly. And then let's talk about Vrbo. That seems to have been, and this is from externally, but it seems to be that's the one that you've most recently been able to kind of turn around, get back into growth. I think you talked about a billion run rate now. So what have been some of the drivers behind the recovery to modest growth at Vrbo and how much better can you get

Ariane Gorin, CEO

that business? So one thing is when I talked in the last earnings call about a billion dollar run rate. It was vacation rentals on brand Expedia. So what we think about vacation rentals as a category. We can distribute it on Vrbo. We can distribute vacation rentals on Expedia or Hotels.com or through our B2B business. And one of the important things we did last year as we were building out Expedia as really the one-stop shop where you could get everything was to better tune the way that we surfaced vacation rentals. So that's why we're very proud that we got to a billion dollar annual run rate. When it comes to Vrbo, the brand, which is a pure play vacation rental play, there's been a combination of things that have allowed it to get to, you know, growth that we're pleased with. One is the work I talked about earlier on supply. So we having more promotions, whether it's early bird promotions, long stay promotions, member deals, if you are a blue silver or gold member so obviously making sure we have competitive and great pricing there's been a lot of work around trust so what our research shows is that 70 percent of people when they're looking at a vacation rental are concerned about is what I see actually going to be what I get it's a bit different from when you're looking at a hotel where you may have more large brands so we've done work around trust it's how to make sure that people can trust that what they're seeing in the listing is what they'll get and then when they get to the property that their experience is going to be what they expected we launched a guest favorite badge we increased the the threshold for sort of our preferred our premier hosts and our premier properties we relaunched verbocare so verbocare is our proposition that basically says if something goes wrong in your stay or before the stay will take care of you so it's all of these things together that drive trust in the traveler you need to have the assortment but you also need to have the trust and then there's all the work in the product of just you know speed uptime you know better content easier checkout and all of the myriad things that any e-commerce company would do and then the cherry on the cake and this is one of my favorites is that we rolled out something called weather promise and weather promise is basically it's an offering where if it rains over a certain number of days during your holiday you're going to get your money back so yeah and so as you we're helping people not only make sure that they're going to get what they you know expected when they're in trip but also you know give them the ability to purchase something that will be an added protection

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

that's clever i didn't know about that all right um i want to ask you a couple questions about ai but you mentioned already the uber deal so let's just touch on that briefly the potential impact of the uber deal and why you decided to do the deal with them yep so first

Ariane Gorin, CEO

i'll start by saying what i had said earlier which is the size of the overall travel market is massive and you know our consumer business is 85 billion well there's a whole lot of travel that happens outside our consumer business and this is where our b2b business comes in and the great thing is the more demand we bring through b2b the more value we bring to our supply partners so in one connection they get access to our demand through our consumer brands as well as through our b2b business so when we sign a partner like uber obviously it gives us some incremental you know volume but it also really helps our value proposition to the supply partners so when uber decided that they wanted to to add hotels to their app they like any company would you know went out and talked to a number of players and we won the deal i believe we won because we have a strong value proposition on our supply on our technology on our servicing um i mean it's really it's the full value proposition and you know years ago we had we would have all these internal debates about well is b2b incremental or not and i just keep on going back to the size of the overall

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

market um okay all right now let's let's touch on a topic that i know you haven't had much

Ariane Gorin, CEO

exposure to ai what is that yeah this is in french we say ia yeah the big uh one of the

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

two biggest overhangs on the on the stock and I think it you know it's a it's a very thoughtful overhang on the stock what happens to the OTAs particularly to you and booking as agentic commerce rolls out and hopefully it'd be a lot more developed than it is today but just talk about this as a as a channel for you how do you think about this risk how do you think investors should think about the ai risk or opportunity to expedia yeah so i think about

Ariane Gorin, CEO

ai for us really in three ways one is what can we do with ai and our product to make it even more valuable for our travelers and partners so i'll come back and talk about that and i think there's a massive opportunity there as i said to be more personalized trusted travel agents the second is how do we benefit from the changes in consumer behavior where they're starting searches in these new ai experiences which is part of i think what's behind your question is agentic and these new services so i'll come to that and then the third is how do we use ai internally in the company to be faster to be more responsive and to drive efficiencies and productivity in our teams maybe i'll go to the second one first because that was the start of your question then i'll go back to one which is the one i'm the most excited about it it is clear that people are starting more of their searches in ai search whether it's in gemini and chat gpt and claude wherever that might be now that that traffic is still quite small it's it's less than about one and a half percent it's growing fast but it's still quite small and we're doing a ton of work to make sure that our brands show up well there and i think it's an incremental demand source for us so we're doing work in aeo and organic we're doing work in paid we're early with chat gpt on their paid ads and i think to the extent that the top of the funnel is fragmenting a bit more whether it's with chat gpt and claude or tick tock moving into travel advertising more meaningfully that is an opportunity for us and the fact that we've been doing work over the last year to in our marketing be able to shift our marketing spend across channels based on a really good understanding of incrementality is really good timing for us and then when you think about agentic you know we have opened our our apps for agents to be able to come in because i want to experiment on everything and again it's it's a very small part of even that one and a half percent that i was talking about and it's early days but from what we can see what the agents are doing is they're coming in and doing a bunch of discovery but not going to the transaction so again i always i hesitate to draw too many conclusions from a small set of data but i think what you're seeing is agents going in probably checking prices trying to get a bunch of information but that people aren't yet comfortable allowing agents to actually make the transaction decision for them because remember you know travel tends to be higher ticket value higher order value there are a lot of different decisions to make at the time that you make the booking if it's a hotel what is the room type what is the rate plan is it refundable is it non-refundable there are so many different things that you don't necessarily want to delegate that to an agent so all up i would just say it's early days we're making sure that we're experimenting we're present where we need to be present we're you know doing the technology work to allow agents to come into us but i actually believe it's going to be the vertical agents not the horizontal agents that over time be the ones that that people trust the most that's kind of the second pillar do you want me to go into sort of the first and why yes please okay i mean i'm talking for a long time so to make sure that i'm not i mean you're doing great um the the part about using ai in our product again is is a massive opportunity um there's sort of invisible ai which is the rankings and the sort order and the recommendations so when you buy a flight what hotels are we proposing to you there's a lot of ai that goes obviously behind that so that we're able to you know surface the things that based on what we know about you you're most likely to transact on there's type ahead there's just a lot of things that are more invisible then there are the things that are more visible so the conversation agents we just rolled out natural language search on verbo and so if you go to the verbo home page i think it's about 50 of traffic right now you can toggle and search by saying you know what i want to go to tahoe the last week of july with eight people i want a hot tub we're automatically going to pre-fill the dates the destination and then when you get to the search results page the content is going to be personalized based on your search as will the results and the amenities and the filters and the like what we're discovering through that is we get more than 60 percent more information about a traveler in that kind of search than we did before if someone just put in the destination and so when you get that additional information you're able to personalize even more and this is again why I keep on going back to we'll be able to be more helpful to travelers to help them get from you know search to find to book all at the you know in a faster way and it's important that you know yes you know there will be agents that can go do some of the transactions but I think people often forget that your people are often happiest when they're in the planning process so the idea that you want to allow an agent to do everything end to end to me is you know there will be some trips that people want to do that with but many trips there's the joy of being able to plan to collaborate with other people to share and so we need to use the technology to take the friction away from it but allow people to still have the joy of it and to do it in a place where they can then connect it directly to the booking and the servicing so that's that's really how i think about that first pillar and then the third is all internal productivity and the to the extent that we can move faster that we can ship faster it will allow us to innovate more for our travelers and partners what we're trying to do as investors is

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

figure out how we can but what you said what you say makes a lot of sense i think another word for ai is personalization yeah there's a real opportunity here we can only tell us investors i guess we look at the top line you know maybe see some acceleration or something and maybe see some margin expansion i what kpis do you look at internally to figure out whether it actually is improving your your products your personalization your book to look ratio yeah at the end of the day that's you know i would think that that you know there should be some and maybe it's still on the come yeah but but what are the right kpis for you internally whether or not you disclose

Ariane Gorin, CEO

them so it it depends on which which part of the business you're looking at as i sort of said there are some things that a traveler may not even know that it's ai behind it so ranking and you know and sort order or attach so we look very closely at are the algorithms that are behind the recommendations improving that i mean it's it's a known way that you can look at the kpis on that that when it comes to newer things like the property expert agent or AI compare or even natural language search we're still in such early days the way I talk to the team about it is how quickly are we learning what are we learning every day every two days every week you know what is the content we're discovering that people want that we don't have I think can too quickly go immediately to the what is the conversion impact or it may be that what we're finding is people are coming to us and using our agents where in the past they would have gone to some you know other ai experience so it might look like conversion is going down because we're seeing people more often but it's just we're getting to play in more of the steps of the discovery process so that's why like any way you look at the data you could make up your own story so i'm really focused on what is it that we're learning and how are we improving the product

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

and then we'll see down the road about conversion do you think i mean what's real what's a reasonable timeline for when this should all show up in our crude external financial metrics is this a 27 ah you know we're gonna look back on 27 and see that's we we finally saw the real impact of

Ariane Gorin, CEO

a personalization in AI? I'm going to frustrate you because I'm not going to have an exact answer, but I think it's a gradual thing. I think like anything, and this is why I talked to the team about brilliant basics, and just it's like a day in, day out, improving things. And over time, you know, if we're doing, you know, the right work and it's paying off, we should see conversion getting better. Now, at the same time, if we're doing that, we should see, you know, more people coming to us. So, you know, that can impact the conversion numbers as well. But I think, you know, Ultimately, it's how is the business growing, and are we keeping our direct business, and are we just growing overall the consumer business?

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

And one specific thing on that, we've done two of these agentic travel reports, and we tried to track Expedia Romy. I think when we, and Georgia did most of the work on this, when we did this a year ago, we actually thought the best AI product for travel was Expedia Romy. And then it sort of seemed like you disappeared it a little bit. But it could be that you've just taken a different approach to it and just wanted to, instead of having a separate named agent or whatever, just infused it throughout the process. Did I get that right?

Ariane Gorin, CEO

You did get that right. So what we did was, and by the way, you're right. We were, I believe we were the first to integrate a chat experience with Romy. It was two years ago. We put that out there. We tested a bunch. We learned. But one of the things we learned is it's pretty tough to have one conversation experience that's going to cover everything from inspiration to shopping to booking to servicing, all of that. What we realized is having point solutions, what we're calling these micro agents, that you train to be really good at a specific thing and that can show up at that moment in the shopping funnel or in the journey is going to be more useful to travelers. So right now we're building a bunch of these microagents. We have property expert, AI compare, we're going to have an activity planner. We've had a servicing agent for quite a while, and that's a really important one to be able to help travelers be able to self-service. And then over time, we can build those all up into one agent. But again, our strategy is these microagents that help at any point in the journey.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

we have open AI presenting here later today they've gone through a little bit of a change it looked like maybe they were going to get into the booking or checkout process and then they backtracked from that I think there was some pretty underwhelming performance that they had from that initial early initiative doesn't mean they can't go back there but what's your sense about is it is it clear to you that the the open AIs the Geminis of the world want to work with you as lead generation partners rather than compete with you as booking agents yeah okay booking

Ariane Gorin, CEO

and servicing is complicated uh there is catalog there is making sure that you have constantly updated and accurate rates and availability if someone tries to book something and it's not the price they expected or the booking doesn't go through it's a problem you have to be there to solve it for them if something goes wrong you know afterwards you need to be able to answer the phone or fix something in product so that people can make changes to their reservations so i would think it's a it's an easier uh problem to solve around advertising and lead generation and a great traveler experience and then leave kind of the tough work of the booking and servicing and the like to us now i mean i think mark you've been in the industry for a while i've been in the industry for a while we've had for many years this discussion of where is the booking going to happen But knowing the complexity of all of it, I'm not surprised that some of them have backed away from it.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

I've thought about the OTAs having two core competencies, supply aggregation and management, and then optimizing different marketing channels. On the supply optimization, ChatGPT can know every single hotel and residence or whatever on the Amalfi Coast but doesn't know their availability.

Ariane Gorin, CEO

doesn't know their availability doesn't know their prices is not able to go negotiate member deals with them is not able to go do promotions i mean you know hotels see us and others as a really great uh lever to be able to fill their hotels to to align with their revenue management strategy and yes technology can help us with that but there's you know there's a lot of relationship that goes in there of saying okay when are your need periods how do we help you in your need periods and that's an expertise that we have and then on the marketing

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

optimization so I think the thoughtful OTA concern their argument is they may not go and directly disintermediate OTAs but you know there's they those tools are becoming such so broadly used and then if they start you've over the last couple of years you've had this increasing percentage of your traffic has been free you know it's because of your loyalty programs etc and what's the risk that that reverses that so I could pitch this either way either you're diversifying your marketing channels you're pretty good at doing that so more diversification more better or I could say it's actually gonna squeeze out crowd out all of that free organic traffic help us resolve this so you know

Ariane Gorin, CEO

what I would say is on the what you're missing in all of that is how by improving our product experiences are we able for all the traffic to come into us to have it convert and then repeat directly so if you know when we put these agents in place when we become more personalized are more people going to start their journey with us because they're confident that we have a great loyalty program we have great rates and availability and a great assortment and in fact Expedia is going to be able to help me plan my trip in a more effective way than it could before i also want to come back to you know your your statement which was you know otas have been good on supply and then you know marketing optimization i would add for us you know the b2b pillar the the fact that we've got over 70 000 partners that we have relationships with that we have deep technology integrations with that we understand the business of that we are helping build travel programs is an asset that I don't think is sufficiently appreciated, sort of the value of that asset.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

And by the way, do we already know that you're able to get more people to come directly to that one statement you just made about getting people to start there because your experience has become better?

Ariane Gorin, CEO

Well, what I would say is we have said publicly we have two-thirds of our bookings that start directly with us. And in fact, over time, I think that that's a great place to be because if you're more than two-thirds direct, then you're probably missing out on attracting new people from outside of your ecosystem to then come in. But to me, it's how do you grow both of them at the same time?

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

And then you mentioned these three strategic pillars at the beginning, and we sort of covered the first two. and then this margin and all investors look at Expedia's margins and they can't help but compare them with bookings margins and there's been this huge gap for a long period of time and historically I think it's for a variety of reasons but you know some of the booking has just been very good at marketing efficiency and uh and uh anyway but but you but you've started to you started to climb it you started to narrow that gap you started to climb it up a little bit so just talk about sources of leverage going forwards and you know do we do you somewhat close this gap your operating margin gap versus Airbnb and booking

Ariane Gorin, CEO

okay and I will start with Rob just let me a little note and I misspoke earlier when I talked about our full-year margin guide it's 100 to 125 bits I don't know why I said 100 to 130 so I just want to recorrect that I'm not updating any kind guidance here okay um look so since i stepped in we you know we've expanded margins in 24 25 26 as we continue to grow the business it was 50 bips in 24 240 and 25 and then we've got our guide for this year this expansion and it is really across all the lines of the pnl recently we've had a lot of expansion coming from our consumer marketing and that is a combination of using ai to have better creative having better measurement capabilities and understanding incrementality and you know and being able to sort of shift across channels and again as the product performs better our marketing dollars should go further again cost of sales as we're able to automate things more whether it's in servicing um or even optimizing some of our cloud costs we should be able to drive more expansion there so overheads is another one you know since i've been enrolled we've had a couple of um of overheads actions where we've reduced the size of our teams and we're just constantly looking for opportunities there and it's balancing that with growth so in creating the capacity to be able to invest in growth while, you know, sort of, I would say, in a systematic way, improving the margin profile of the company.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

Is getting leverage in consumer marketing a backhanded way of saying that prior Expedia management teams were poorly spending their marketing dollars?

Ariane Gorin, CEO

Well, you know, I don't like to talk about the past in that way because probably a few years from now, someone will be on this stage, you know, ask them the same question, and I'm hoping they won't say no arion didn't do it look i think everyone does uh you know what like the deck of cards that they're dealt you do the best job where you can when you look at the 2021 to 2024 period in the consumer business we were going through a lot of platform migrations we had just come out of covid it was really difficult to understand you know where was demand coming from what was happening and you know we've now we're in a place where we have the foundations in place to be able to have a better understanding of returns and it's true that i've been more demanding with the team on what do we expect to get in our in our channels okay uh help us

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

interpret some of the changes you've had in the in the team what's your approach you know you've You've been with the company for 10 years now? 13 years. 13 years. And so you've watched a bunch of different management styles. You've come in, and I think you've had a different management style. Do you want to explain what that style is?

Ariane Gorin, CEO

You could explain from the outside what the style. No, I'm happy to say. I would say I'm someone who, I think people who know me would say Arianne is, she's an operator. She's very pragmatic. I mean, she's like, I have big ambition for the team. I always tell them they got to think big, but also be executing on the basics. And so it's sort of this constant pivot between what is the big picture that's gonna take us to the long-term, but also the short-term. I've also focused the team a lot on what is the traveler value? Let's not get enamored with the platform that we're building and the technology we're doing. I mean, it's exciting, but what is the traveler value and what's the partner value? And I think because I grew up in the company, in the B2B business and working on the supply side of the business. I'm really attuned to basically what's happening outside in the market and how do we differentiate ourselves from others. I think the other thing people who know me would say, Arianne, is I have high expectations of myself and of the team. We need to have ambition. We need to be hungry. We need to think about what are the possibilities. Forget about what's happened in the past. What can we do in the future? And if you look at sort of where the management team is now, we've got, over the last couple of years, a new head of technology, a new head of product, both of whom actually ran product and tech before, had experiences in various companies. I liked bringing in people who had experiences from outside of the travel sector. And bar none, I would say, you look at our management team, we're a hungry team, we're ambitious, And I think we want to go out there and win, and we're mission-driven in the sense that we get to be in a business that helps people connect in the real world, and that's a real purpose. We're also very competitive, and want to be successful in the marketplace.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

Okay, five minutes, two more questions. Any comments at all on the overall travel demand in the market now? I think the Hilton CEO talked about some sort of C-shaped economy. I don't know what that is, but you know.

Ariane Gorin, CEO

didn't want to do the K it was the C but I was still talking at our last earnings call about the K-shaped economy I mean you certainly see more strength on the high end versus on the low end and you know that that continues to be the case in the US there's a big summer ahead of us with the World Cup with US 250 but we're certainly keeping a close eye on what's going on you've got you know it's very public the airlines that have you know taken some capacity out of of the market the pricing is going up so what we're focused on is how do we make sure that our marketplaces our brands and our b2b business has you know supply and offers at all price points I guess well I'll try to ask you is I don't know

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

what a k2c means is that things getting better or things getting worse and it

Ariane Gorin, CEO

would you comment one way or the other I would just I mean I will stick by my a K-shaped economy.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

K-shaped. Okay.

Ariane Gorin, CEO

All right. It's not my case.

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

I mean, it's the K-shaped economy. And then last question, just as a, how about the competitive mode or the differentiation question? And you know, it's funny that as people have talked about OTAs forever, it's like, well, what's the real competitive differentiation with a booking at Expedia? You could book that, the Omni hotel room, you can book this seven, eight, 18 different ways, and yet there have only been two OTAs for, you know, 20 years now, or something like that. Okay, Airbnb came in, but really there's only been two OTAs, so I guess it's an easy business to enter, but a very difficult business to scale, something like that, but just talk about the competitive differentiation that Expedia has. Why is it that Expedia has, you know, just generally become bigger over time, and why there haven't been a bunch of other Expedias?

Ariane Gorin, CEO

Well, let me start at the company level, and then I'll talk about the brand. at the company level i think the real differentiator for expedia group is the diversified demand portfolio we have where you've got the three big consumer brands and you have a b2b business that you know accesses demand across corporate travel offline retail loyalty programs airlines, hotel business, OTAs in emerging markets. So we're able to really get exposure to all of that demand. And then, as I said earlier, that allows us to bring more value to our supply partners like hotels and airlines and the like, which in turn allows us to get better content and it feeds the flywheel. So I think both for our supply partners and even for investors, this idea that, you know, we are this diversified travel demand company is one thing. When it comes to the consumer business, you know, Expedia, it's funny, we're the original super app and travel, like we are the one place you go to go places with car and air and hotel and vacation rentals and activities and really all of that. And it's always been about packaging and bundling and the loyalty program and I think the more scale you get the more you can invest in great experiences and bringing more value to travelers so we continue to do that but you know your question about why are other people doing it as I said the travel industry is massive and there are a lot of people who will find where is their moat going to be in travel you know you've got the financial institutions or credit card companies that will have travel programs. You have airlines that, you know, we will power the hotel part of their loyalty program because people want to use their airline loyalty points to book a hotel and it doesn't make sense for them to go directly. So I think that's actually what's exciting is that there are a lot of different places where travel can fit in and our B2B business can power them. So yes, we work to make sure that each of our three big consumer brands has a clear value proposition people know why they should come back and be loyal but the reality is people book in a lot of different ways in travel and we want to be

Mark Mahaney, Analyst — Evercore ISI

present for all of them that's great all right arianne goran ceo of xpedia thank you very much Thank you, Mark.